Trapped in a polygamous household

Muslim women in Italy seek escape from abuse

Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, July 19, 2008

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Souad Sbai, second from right, is a Moroccan-born Italian lawmaker who is a champion of female Muslim immigrants in Italy. "It is absurd that in a civilized country like Italy, so little is acknowledged about this," she said of the abuse some women face. Illustrates ITALY-POLYGAMY (category i) by Tracy Wilkinson (c) 2008, Los Angeles Times. Moved Friday, July 18, 2008. (MUST CREDIT: Photo for the Los Angeles Times by Saber Mounia.) less

Souad Sbai, second from right, is a Moroccan-born Italian lawmaker who is a champion of female Muslim immigrants in Italy. "It is absurd that in a civilized country like Italy, so little is acknowledged about ... more

Photo: TPN

Trapped in a polygamous household

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A few miles from the Vatican, Najat Hadi kept house with her husband, his other wife and their assorted children, an unhappy home with a hateful woman 10 years her junior and a cruel spouse who left her with a jagged scar peeking from her collar.

Finally, she says, her Egyptian-born husband, who worked in Rome making pizzas, beat her so badly that she left him. But he kept her children.

Thousands of polygamous marriages like Hadi's have sprung up throughout Italy as a byproduct of a voluminous immigration by Muslims to this Roman Catholic country.

Despite the obvious culture clash, Italian authorities largely turn a blind eye, leaving women in a murky semi-clandestine world with few rights and no recourse when things go badly, as they did in Hadi's case.

"It is absurd that in a civilized country like Italy, so little is acknowledged about this," said Souad Sbai, a Moroccan-born Italian lawmaker who has emerged as a one-woman champion of female Muslim immigrants in Italy.

Italy is one of several European nations faced with the issue of polygamy. In Britain and Spain, where large Muslim communities also have settled, some officials favor recognizing polygamous marriage as a way to ensure the wives' access to pensions, medical care and other state benefits.

But Sbai, who has lived 27 of her 47 years in Italy, said misguided attempts at cultural sensitivity backfire when customs that stray into illegality are tolerated. Italian law sanctions marriage between a single man and a single woman only.

Sbai estimates there are 14,000 polygamous families in Italy; others put the number even higher. Many take advantage of the so-called orfi marriage, a less formal union performed by an imam, that does not carry the same social or legal standing as regular marriage.

She is convinced that the polygamists in Italy are practicing a more fundamentalist and abusive form of multiple marriage. Because they feel so threatened by the Western culture around them, the men often imprison their wives and confine them to a life of solitude wholly dependent on the husband.

"They are kept in a kind of ghetto," Sbai said.

When Sbai recently created a hot line for Muslim immigrant women, she was inundated with 1,000 calls in the first three months. To her astonishment, she had tapped into a hidden community of women desperate for information, many trapped in violent, polygamous households, isolated and lonely.

Hadi, a Moroccan, had endured beatings and humiliation because she felt she had nowhere to turn. She said she met and married her husband in 1987 in Italy, where she was visiting on holiday. They had a religious ceremony at a local mosque and a legal wedding at the Egyptian Embassy in Rome. Over the next decade, she gave birth to four children.

Then, one day in 2000, Hadi returned from a vacation in Egypt, where she had taken the children to spend time with her husband's family. In her Rome apartment was a new woman. Her husband had married again while she was gone.

"I returned and found her in my house," said Hadi, 46, who said she at first challenged her husband but then decided there was little she could do.

"He said, 'I've married this woman.' I wanted to know why. I told him to send her away. He refused. But where could I go with four children?"

She said she tried to accommodate the other woman, an Egyptian whom Hadi describes as full of hatred.

"I tried to accept her, for the children," Hadi said. "But she wasn't a woman with a brain."

Her husband's beatings got worse, landing Hadi repeatedly in the hospital. The pale scar on her chest is a remnant of the time she says he went after her with a knife.

Then, about a year and a half ago, he turned on the children. And that was when she decided she had to go. From other Moroccan women, she learned of Sbai's center and prepared to file a criminal complaint against him. But he seized the children and fled to Egypt. Hadi has not been able to move authorities to help her regain custody.

Of the hundreds of women Sbai hears from, most are Moroccans and illiterate, at a much higher percentage rate than in the general population of Morocco. That also tends to isolate them, a condition compounded by mistrust of Italian authorities and fear of the unknown.